Elevator Music 29: Tim Davis: Unphotographable

Elevator Music 29: Unphotographable features a new sound piece by Tim Davis consisting entirely of composed samples of the word “unphotographable” taken from various recordings of the 1937 Rodgers and Hart show tune, “My Funny Valentine.” While Davis is best known as a photographer, Unphotographable represents a new direction in his work based on his ever-growing collection of indexical audio, visual, and cultural curiosities. Davis describes his shift in focus as a form of reckoning with the ease with which we can now accumulate digital technology. Davis describes the large format analog cameras he has traditionally worked with as “speaking in complete sentences,” while digital cameras speak in snippets, “happily collecting any fragment of information put before them, and allowing tiny noticings to be fleshed out into large-scale investigations.”